Thursday, May 08, 2014

Through the Grapevine

The past week has been full of surprises, thrills, and chills -- as is
most every week lately. Through the grapevine, I heard that my oldest
son, David Scott, was assaulted and in the hospital having abdominal
surgery. Evidently, he was carjacked, beaten with a baseball bat, and
waited 24 hours to go to the hospital. I asked him why he waited and he
said he thought he could just suck it up. He's sucked up a lot over the
years when he had stabbed himself with a knife to add veracity to his
stories (yes, there were multiple episodes) that he had been accosted,
assaulted, stabbed, and whatever he came back without (usually my
possessions or someone else's) were stolen, but he fought hard to get
them back. Of course, the money and/or things (my car radio, tools,
etc.) were never retrieved, but the stab wounds (usually in his thigh)
were bloody and his pants ripped, but then who doesn't have ripped pants
in their closet or drawer since that is considered high fashion. Blood
is just fodder for the story that inevitably follows.

Okay, so
David Scott is in the hospital on a ventilator and has undergone major
abdominal surgery for a bucket handle tear of his intestines, which the
doctors had to go in and rearranged, closing the tear, and his belly is
still open with a wound VAC attached. He has been in surgery 3x since
then and I haven't yet heard about the results of the surgery yesterday
because they hadn't taken him in yet when I called right before starting
work. It was too late to call after work and there have been no
messages. They took David off the ventilator on Sunday and I have spoken
to him twice since then when he was actually lucid and his voice didn't
sound like it had been dragged backward over rough grit sandpaper while
gargling sharp-edged kidney stones.

Now that he is able to talk
the waterworks have been several appearances and some of the carjacking
story had surfaced as well. First came the "I'm sorrys" punctuated by
sounds of muffled tears and the anguish I have come to know so well
after these episodes. The car wasn't his; it belonged to a friend, which
is why he fought so hard with the carjackers armed with only a baseball
bat. The story goes that he was stopped because the engine stopped and
he was looking under the hood with the driver's side door open when he
heard someone get into the car. He looked up, saw the thieves were
trying to steal the car -- the same car where the engine had already
died at an inopportune moment -- and he got into a tussle with them. He
was overwhelmed and was beaten with the baseball bat they carried with
them and eventually dragged several feet as they thieves took off in the
car (evidently without putting down the hood of the car first) with him
hanging on for dear life. "I fought so hard because the car didn't
belong to me," he said through hitching sobs and a waterfall of tears
bravely held back.

I cannot say I have ever heard of carjackers
using a baseball bat or, if they did use a bat, why the only place on
his body they hit repeatedly was his abdomen. Carjackers want to
incapacitate and immobilize their victims, so the knees and head would
be the quickest and most efficacious target, not the belly.

David
assured me he had road rash on his back from being dragged behind the
car (maybe beside it -- he hasn't actually worked out his story
sufficiently) and that he fought so hard. The car is gone. David is in
the hospital still -- under a fake name and birth date, which I didn't
discover until the second time I called and talked to a nurse. Yes, he
told the hospital staff his name was Michael and he was born in October
1978 instead of November 11, 1973. After clearing that little mistake in
his hospital record (and clearing it up again twice more with the
doctors), I was able to get more information. The doctor and
anesthesiologist called me for permissions before he went into surgery
on Sunday and I have spoken to the ICU doctor once, who was still of the
opinion that David Scott's name was Michael, about David's surgery and
prognosis, most of which information the doctor didn't have since he was
the ICU doctor and not one of the surgeons. It is taxing listening to a
doctor go on about bucket-handle mesenteric tears and rearranging
bowel, washing out fecal matter from the abdomen, and exactly what a
wound VAC is when I've already explained several times I've been doing
medical transcription for acute care hospitals for about 30 years. I
don't know how lay people sit through all this stuff without screaming.

At
any rate, the story continues to change. David doesn't remember his
estranged wife, Julie, has been to see him. He hasn't received a phone
call from his father and stepmother in spite of his stepmother, Brenda,
demanding I give them the number so they can call by way of the familial
grapevine where I have given updates, and I am heartily sick of the
whole shooting match. I am David's mother and I do care about him, but I
have to say that this is just one more upside down pyramid of lies in a
world wide web of lies that I have heard over the nearly 40 years of my
son's life. He lies even when the truth sounds better. For an
intelligent and talented man, my son wastes his talents on carving a
wide swath of destruction everywhere he goes, littering the views with
mounds of battered, broken hearted, and much poorer bodies, most of
which have been women. It is exhausting.

As my friend Jeff says at the end of his updates, so tell me about your week.